There's an old saying about politics making strange bedfellows, and the issue of drilling for oil in Alaska is a perfect example.

The Democrats have long been the champion of organized labor, and labor unions traditionally support Democrats.

But W's plan to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is drawing support from organized labor and criticism from the Democrats.

Teamsters president James Hoffa recently said his union's support of the plan isn't creating a rift with Democrats, but one must wonder.

Hoffa has been working on Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., to try to convince him not to block the drilling measure when it comes up in the Senate.

The plan narrowly passed the House in July.

On one of the Sunday news shows, as reported by Associated Press, Hoffa said he would talk to Lieberman and, "I think we've got to turn people around. You know, they said we couldn't do this in the House, and we were able to do it. We think we can do it in the Senate.'

Well, I suppose if anybody could turn Lieberman around it would be the head of the Teamsters.

Even then, I think it would be a tough sell for Hoffa.

Hoffa went on to say, according to AP, that drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge would strengthen the nation's economy and create hundreds of thousands of jobs.

'It makes us more independent of Saddam Hussein and other people who control our oil. It creates jobs,' he said of

W's plan.

How very Republican of him.

But the thing that is really kind of silly about the whole arctic drilling issue is the way that it is portrayed by some members of the left.

They make it sound as if there will be oil derricks all over the place and the whole ANWR is at risk.

Truth is, the House-passed version of the plan requires that no more than 2,000 acres of the refuge be permanently affected by drilling activities.

OK, that's 2,000 acres. There are farms that size in our county. 2,000 acres is a lot of land in Kosciusko County.

But believe me, in Alaska, it's barely a speck.

I recently read a fascinating article in National Review. Johan Goldberg, editor of National Review Online, visited the ANWR.

He points out that Alaska is "mind-bogglingly huge." He notes for example, that Alaska has a population about the same as Washington, D.C., but that you could fit D.C. in Alaska 9,000 times. He adds, "You could squeeze California into it four times; New York state, more than 11 times."

Then he quotes a Prudhoe Bay doctor who notes, "We don't even bother putting out Connecticut-sized forest fires up here. Maybe we start to worry when they get to be the size of Virginia."

These 2,000 acres are located in a coastal plain. The coastal plain is approximately 1.5 million acres.

That means that 1,498,000 acres of the coastal plain won't be affected by drilling.

Further, we have to consider that the 1.5-million acre coastal plain is only a small part of the entire ANWR.

The entire ANWR comprises 19.7 million acres. The coastal plain is at the very northernmost tip of the ANWR. The coastal plain is several mountain ranges away from the beautiful, untouched, primitive, virgin, pristine, sacred, attach-your-favorite-environmental-adjective-here part of the ANWR.

So W's plan calls for drilling in .01015 percent of the ANWR. (Goldberg points out that the 2,000-acre drilling site is 50 times smaller than the Montana ranch owned by Ted Turner, who is bankrolling efforts to kill W's plan.)

And that tiny percentage is located in some of the most hostile, barren real estate on the planet.

The natives of the area, the Inupiat Eskimos, almost unanimously endorse oil development on the coastal plain because they get a piece of the pie. And they are a very poor people.

The Gwich'in people, who environmentalists like to talk about, almost unanimously oppose the drilling. They say it will disrupt the caribou herds that their lifestyle depends on. They have testified before Congress.

But in Prudhoe Bay, where the most extensive drilling occurs, caribou herds have increased by a factor of five since drilling began.

The caribou come to the coastal plain seeking respite from the swarms of biting flies and mosquitoes found inland.

They seem to like to hang out around the pipeline, seeking shade in the summer and warmth in the winter. And they congregate around the roads and gravel pads. The breezes there are slightly stronger and help keep the bugs down.

All in all, according to Goldberg, the caribou get along quite well with the drilling.

A closer look at the Gwich'in reveals that they courted the oil companies a decade ago, but alas, there was no oil on their land. (Their land is hundreds of miles away from the coastal plain on the other side of a mountain range.)

The Inupiats claim that the Gwich'in are not as opposed to drilling as they are upset that they can't have any.

So should we drill up there or not?

Goldberg quotes this little gem from a 1980s vintage Washington Post article about the coastal plain. "That part of the ANWR is one of the bleakest, most remote places on this continent, and there is hardly any other where drilling would have less impact on the surrounding life."

But this is not the picture being painted by environmentalists and other opponents of the plan. And it is not the picture painted by the media.

I think the general perception foisted on us by environmentalists and an all-to-compliant national media is that W's plan threatens to destroy the ANWR.

It simply isn't the truth. [[In-content Ad]]